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TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

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Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#171

Post by helij »

varispeed wrote: post #151
tjpnz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just knowing how the thing is built doesn't seem to be enough. Comac still sources its jet engines from Pratt and Whitney for instance, despite many years of trying no local manufacturer has been able to build them to the same spec.

Building even basic things is difficult. Friend of mine tried like dozen companies from around the world to manufacture very basic milled aluminium part. None of them could make it. Only one company could make 1 or 2 right out of 100.

Sorry, but I find that hard to believe. Part certainly wasn't very basic.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#172

Post by CGMthrowaway »

sgarland wrote: post #32

Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was ab…

A common and innovative solution to this problem now, that I have seen in other fabs (not semis, but other industries), is to put QR codes on each machine. That way the info behind it can be dynamic and maintained

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#173

Post by pc86 »

relaxing wrote: post #167
pc86 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min... TLDR: It's nonsense.

Funny how many words it takes to say Elon’s dad in fact own a stake in an emerald mine, invest in Elon’s business, and give Elon an incredibly privileged upbringing.

There's a lot of unanswered questions from the article which is seems anyone with even mediocre skills as a journalist should be willing and able to answer.

It mentions the mine "collapsed" in 1989. Does that mean literally? Just financially? Was there an insurance payout? Did everyone lose their investment? Did Errol Musk own 1% or 90%?

* In quoting another article, it does say: "Errol Musk, an engineer, owned a small percentage of an emerald mine and had a couple of good years before the mine went bust and wiped out his investment."

Elon graduated from college less than 10 years later but says he was $100k in debt. Was he actually in debt? Did he spend years paying that off or did he (or someone else) pay it off shortly after in a lump sum or very quickly?

His dad provided $20k of a $200k seed round for Zip2, was the rest also from friends and family or more institutional investors? Did his dad receive equity for that or was it a gift?

Reading through the article again (and a little more closely than before) it doesn't seem Elon had "an incredibly privileged upbringing" but maybe that's a mix of good PR and this now being 40-some years ago? They're referred to as upper middle class but if that's all it takes to be "incredibly privileged" then 90% of the kids born to people reading HN are also incredibly privileged.

Arnold's piece seems to contradict basically everything else in the article so I'm not sure what to make of it, but it also sounds like he made about $350k profit over the lifetime of his ownership in the mine? Certainly not nothing but it's not opulence and it doesn't sound like most (any?) of that made its way to Elon.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#174

Post by CGMthrowaway »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #88
sgarland wrote: post #32

Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was ab…

This abuse of Excel might be in the running for a new form of esports.

It just sounds like Mail Merge to me. Which if you were using a computer for work in the 90s, you might know something about. (It was also convoluted) :)

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#175

Post by CGMthrowaway »

bwfan123 wrote: post #63
sneak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frequently wonder what steps SpaceX security has to take, given the insane geopolitical significance of reusable rockets and cheap access to orbit.

There is a very nice chapter in the somewhat dated but classic book Business Adventures [1] on trade-secrets and what happens when employees of one company move to another. In chapter 11, "A man, his knowledge, and his job", there is a story of a "space-suit" manufacturer Goodrich suing an employee for moving to its rival Latex for stealing trade-secrets. The story is timely in context of Meta hiring researchers from…

What is the story?

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#176

Post by 0xffff2 »

blackguardx wrote: post #78
pc86 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ITAR is mostly just to stop the outright sale of controlled items to foreign entities, not necessarily to prevent IP theft or corporate espionage.

I worked on an ITAR-controlled camera once and it was drilled into me than even allowing a non-US person to view the output images of the camera constituted an ITAR violation.

Right, which is all well and good if you're a benevolent actor, but ITAR really doesn't do anything at all to stop you from intentionally committing (corporate or actual) espionage if you want to. There should still be controls to prevent you from violating ITAR either accidentally or on purpose.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#177

Post by monkeyelite »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #164
monkeyelite wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t be facetious

Okay, substitute Taliban for the Church of Scientology or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's a marginally less absurd proposal. My point stands. Proposing extreme religious nepotism as a good counter-measure to deal with espionage 1) would be minimally effective (see the IDF infiltrating Hamas and Iran regularly), and 2) is ridiculous.

> Proposing extreme religious nepotism as a good counter-measure

Please read the thread again.

This is not a prescription. This is a description of how high trust markets work.

See this classic economics paper “Jewish Diamond Merchants in New York”: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=349040

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#178

Post by tomasphan »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #127
protimewaster wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM has been publicly working toward 2nm since at least 2021, though, so it doesn't seem like it's coming from nowhere. Unless this is a completely different 2nm development, here's a presser about it from 2021, titled "Introducing the world's first 2 nm node chip" ( https://research.ibm.com/blog/2-nm-chip )

[flagged]

What’s going on big guy? Maybe take a break from commenting

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#179

Post by _DeadFred_ »

tjpnz wrote: post #23
ants_everywhere wrote: post #6

Industrial espionage has to be totally insane to defend against these days.

Just knowing how the thing is built doesn't seem to be enough. Comac still sources its jet engines from Pratt and Whitney for instance, despite many years of trying no local manufacturer has been able to build them to the same spec.

I can't remember but I think Lance Air or Epic got split in a sale and a company bought the type design/blueprints but ran into issues actually manufacturing from them.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#180

Post by relaxing »

pc86 wrote: post #173
relaxing wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how many words it takes to say Elon’s dad in fact own a stake in an emerald mine, invest in Elon’s business, and give Elon an incredibly privileged upbringing.

There's a lot of unanswered questions from the article which is seems anyone with even mediocre skills as a journalist should be willing and able to answer. It mentions the mine "collapsed" in 1989. Does that mean literally? Just financially? Was there an insurance payout? Did everyone lose their investment? Did Errol Musk own 1% or 90%? * In quoting another article, it does say: "Errol Musk, an engineer, owned a sma…

> Elon mostly lived with his father, who says he owned thoroughbred horses, a yacht, several houses and a Cessna. One of their homes was in Waterkloof, a leafy suburb of Pretoria that was popular with foreign diplomats.

> Wanderlust ran on both sides of the family. On holidays, Errol and his kids would travel, he said: to Europe, Hong Kong, throughout the United States. Or they'd take the plane to Lake Tanganyika [in Zambia], where Errol had a stake in an emerald mine.

That sounds more privileged than upper middle class to me.

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